Thoughts on Wild Hearts Can't Be Broken and White Fang

Last month, on Disney Plus, I watched two early 90s movies I had never seen: Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken and White Fang, both from 1991.

I had vaguely heard of Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken as a kid, from the memorable title, but didn’t know what it was about until many years later. It’s an inspirational horse girl movie about a real-life stunt diver named Sonora Webster, who in the 1920s (1932 in the film) performed in a diving horse show in circuses, which looked pretty cruel and thankfully has been phased out. (Though the movie did take safety measures to protect the horses and the jumps were only from ten feet up, but using optical illusions to make it look like forty feet from a distance). Gabrielle Anwar played Sonora, and did a pretty good Southern accent for a British actor. She’s an orphaned teen in the Depression, whose aunt sees her as a problem and disowns her to an orphanage, so she takes off and ends up joining the circus, learning the craft from the real-life Western figure Dr. W.F. Carver (Cliff Robertson) and his son Al (Michael Schoeffling). I liked her spunkiness and being pushed to succeed past her limitations, even if I didn’t like the stunt she does. She goes blind from an accident, but learns to continue through vibrations and touch, and did it for another 11 years, and lived a long life, dying at age 99 in 2003.

It was a pretty good movie, and Anwar was very likable and charming in it. I did laugh when, for the first half of the movie, she is costumed to look scrappy and disheveled, so much that the diving girl who she eventually replaces tells her that she has “no natural beauty,” when she is obviously beautiful. But I felt the same way with the 1994 Little Women adaptation, when Jo cuts off her hair and is met with being told she lost her “one beauty,” which would make sense if a plainer actress played her, not the gorgeous Winona Ryder.

Michael Schoeffling was handsome but dull as an actor, this was his final acting performance before he retired to create a successful furniture business. I ended up liking Dylan Kussman more as the dorky redhead teen boy who is a hired hand and has an obvious crush on Sonora but no real chance with her next to Schoeffling.

I watched White Fang, the 1991 one with Ethan Hawke. I liked it, it felt a little slower to get into. It felt a little rougher than usual Disney movies, because it starts and ends with disclaimers assuring that animals were not harmed in the film, as there are several dog fighting scenes in the film, a cameo from Bart the Bear, and wolves vs. dogs. It takes place in 1896, and Ethan Hawke plays an orphaned teen boy or young adult who travels to the Yukon Territory from San Francisco to pan for gold and continue his absentee father’s work, and pairs up with guys on a dog sled team to transport a body and search for gold. White Fang (played by Jed, a wolf-dog from The Thing and The Journey of Natty Gann) is a wolf-dog hybrid played by adorable pups whose mother is killed in self-defense by the men, and who dies in front of her pup, which was sad to watch. White Fang is adopted by indigenous people, then blackmailed into selling by an abuser (James Remar) who forces the dog into vicious dog fighting and cages and starves him. Ethan Hawke, who had encounters with the dog, including the dog saving his life from Bart the Bear, rescues White Fang and rehabilitates him to accept love and trust again.

I generally liked it, it didn’t feel as cutesy or as light due to the dog fighting scenes, as well as the frozen dead body being shown, and everyone being rough and a little gruff because it’s how to survive among wolves, bears, and greedy men. I did like that the movie ends with a card saying that wolves shouldn’t be hunted or demonized, and for them not to be endangered or vilified. I thought it was a nice message to end on.